


Loops

by gabsrambles



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, it does not have a happy end, read for angst and angst alone :), this is not a happy fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-11 22:59:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15982313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabsrambles/pseuds/gabsrambles
Summary: Prompt: how about a time travel fic where someone tries to save a life but they keep failing. No one knows they are time travelling.





	Loops

The device is unstable.

Unpredictable. It’s everything that Lena stands against in the name of science.

Her shaking fingers slam the button anyway, stumble over the switches and then everything is black and all she can see is the glint of a kryptonite blade and Alex’s desperate, clawing look across a gleaming casket.

She sits up in a bed, nausea rolling in her gut and her skin clammy. Her lab is gone.

Instead, she’s in her bed, she’s finally realised, the smell the first thing to register. Fresh cotton sheets. She squeezes her eyes shut, that lump that seems to live in her throat growing and growing. The sun is warm on her skin, just like it had been that final morning.

Because she remembers everything from that day.

It worked. Almost an entire day to change history.

She opens her eyes and scrambles for her phone.

 _September 19_ _th_ _, 2018_.

She’s three months in the past and here, Kara has to be alive.

She taps the call button and it rings three times before Kara’s voice answer.

“Lena? It’s five am?”

Her voice is rough with sleep but it’s _her_ voice and all Lena can do is fail at muffling a sob.

“Lena? Are you okay?”

She’s not. She’s anything but okay, right now. But Kara is _alive_.

They meet earlier for coffee than they really did in the past and Lena can’t even care about any rules that she made for herself, the promise to only change the one thing.

That one thing is going to have huge effects anyway, so at this point, she really can’t find it within herself to care.

And Kara is there and breathing and her hair is lose around her shoulders and she’s smiling, a little sleepy. And there. Lena throws her arms around her and hugs her so tight Kara actually makes a winded sound.

Because of course she does.

That just makes Lena remember more and squeeze her tighter. The smell of her, the feel—it’s everything she’s remembered.

“That must’ve been one hell of a nightmare,” Kara murmurs. “But remember,” and her voice drops low, “I’m all tapped after that fight a few days ago. I think you might be cracking a rib.”

A joke, something flippant, but all Lena sees is that glint of kryptonite and the wide opened shock in Kara’s eyes. The sound of bone splintering.

She tries to be normal at coffee, but isn’t. Not at all.

Because nothing happens until the evening and Lena starts working on her now, convincing Kara to come for dinner and to ask Alex and make it a quiet one in, far from the public space she’d been in before.

Kara agrees and the day is spent by Lena avoiding work and cooking in her apartment and messaging Kara just to get replies. Emojis and jokes and she comes by early, like Lena asks her to and they share a wine, and Alex shows up and she looks so _healthy_ , not gaunt and far too thin with black smudges under her eyes and a permanent sadness in the set of her mouth.

It doesn’t work.

He just shows up in Lena’s apartment, jumping through the window and that blade comes up, hard, in the exact same spot it had originally, right under her ribs and Alex’s scream rings in her ear and Kara’s hands grapple at the blade, right at the hilt, slicing her palms open and there’s red and green and the blue of her eyes flicker from Alex to Lena and that same damn look is there.

An apology, right there in her eye, even as the life fades from it.

There’s a sickening feeling and everything goes black and Lena’s in her lab, like she never left. She throws up, from the effects or her having to watch that again, she doesn’t know.

She failed.

So she tries again.

She tries everything. She anonymously tips the DEO about the threat, his movements traced by Alex obsessively after Kara died. But he evades them all and still manages to swing that blade at Kara.

The tip attempt she tries many times, in different ways, one time even putting a threat on Kara’s life over the phone as if she herself is the killer. Because Kara’s solar flared, Alex takes the phone call seriously and puts Kara in protective custody but he still makes it through, still finds her, still with that weapon.

The fifth time, Lena calls Kara to her office but he finds them there.

She tries to get them out of the city, on a helicopter on a lie to Kara about a good story, but he finds them. She tries that in different ways, in a car, on a ferry. She makes something to alter Kara’s DNA reading for 24 hours but he _still_ finds them.

And Kara dies the same way, every time. With shock on her face and an apology in her eye.

They still always have coffee, in the morning, and Lena lives for it. For the way Kara laughs across the table and quotes bad boy band music. The way that when she’s without her powers, there’s something almost relaxed about it.

The sixteenth time, Lena actually asks her. “You’re different when you’re…tapped?”

There’s no point keeping her voice down—Kara Danvers will be dead in less that ten hours. But Kara doesn’t know that, and Lena’s throat aches and aches with the life on her face and the truth in Lena’s chest.

“Well, I have no powers,” the last word is whispered. And Kara smiles that smile she does when she’s being evasive, being light when something in her heart is heavy and Lena wants to take that feeling for her. To carry the world, the _worlds_ , she’s always shouldering for her, just for a little while.

When Lena just cocks her head, Kara looks away, before she takes a breath.

“I hate it.” The words are soft, none of that hatred in them. “I mean, I feel stripped bare. Defenceless.” She looks back up and the blue in her eye is like an ocean—too deep to gather any kind of meaning. “But I also feel…I don’t know. Free. I can just be me. Whatever that happens to be.”

And that lump is choking her, Lena swears.

Because there’s a hint there, that Kara is still figuring out who that _me_ is and she’s never going to get to unless Lena can just _figure this out_.

The twenty third time, Lena is exhausted, sleeping between attempts and trying again and again, but she’s not going to stop. And Kara makes an off hand comment at coffee, a joke right back at one of Lena’s jokes. “Just stab me in the back why don’t you?”

And suddenly, Lena can’t breathe. She’s seen Kara die twenty four times in front of her. With blood at the corner of her lips and green tracking through her system and blood on her hands as she desperately tries to push the thing killing her _out_.

Lena gets up quickly and goes to the bathroom and, of course, Kara follows.

“Hey. Are you okay?”

She’s not. Lena is anything but okay and she can’t watch it again. She can’t watch the light fade from Kara’s eyes and hear Alex’s scream, if she’s there, and feel that tug, that fading, blackening feeling, sickening as she’s pulled back to a future that’s no different to the one she’s so desperate to change.

Kara’s staring at her, no idea she’s about to die. So noble in everything she’s done, murdered by an alien with such innate tracking ingrained that the DEO still can’t figure it out three months later and a grudge against anyone from Krypton.

Lena kisses her.

She lurches forwards and grabs handfuls of Kara’s shirt and presses her lips to Kara’s. It’s messy and too much and something she barely acknowledged she’s wanted forever because she pushed it so far down.

Kara barely moves.

Until she does.

Her lips parting with a sigh and her hands coming up to cup Lena’s cheeks. They’re pressed so close, flush against one another and Lena still tugs her closer. Kara’s breath puffs out against her cheek through her nose and her tongue grazes Lena’s.

Lena wants to die, right then.

Because they could have had this, apparently.

This could have been something Lena had.

And she tears away and Kara is staring at her and Lena going to sob right there. So instead she pushes past and leaves Kara behind.

She goes and sits in a bar and she stays there, eyes glued on the clock until everything starts to warp and bend and nausea is bubbling in her throat and she’s back in her lab and she knows she failed again.

Unsurprising, since she didn’t even try.

She’s not drunk anymore, somehow. Something to do with this traveling through time thing. So she goes to the bar she knows Alex will be at and slides into a seat next to her.

This Alex she knows. This Alex is like a friend, when that Alex in the past is a stranger.

This Alex pushes the bottle of whiskey towards her and the bartender who knows them both, too, gives her a tumbler and Lena has a drink.

She can still taste Kara’s lips, so she takes another.

“I know what you’re doing,” Alex says.

Lena’s head whips around.

Alex is staring right her, eyes bloodshot and as gaunt as ever. “I know you’ve made the machine. Brainy figured it out. He picked up some kind of reading.”

“Why hasn’t he tried to stop me?”

“I wouldn’t let him.”

Alex is still just staring at her.

“It’s been weeks." There's a crack in Alex's voice. "Why isn’t she back yet?” Her voice is small, like a broken child and Lena’s chin juts up, just a little, as if she can protect herself from such pain.

“I…” And she has to say it. “I can’t make it stop.”

Alex looks a little like she’s been slapped.

But Lena keeps going, her voice a whisper. “She just keeps dying. I’ve tried everything.”

And she has. She’s tried killing the man herself, she’s tried to hide Kara, to lock her in a bunker, to do everything and anything. Alex herself and the full DEO force protected her and they all failed because this alien has every power Lena has every heard of.

And Alex’s jaw is clenched so hard, her eyes brimming and she finally lets out a shattered, shaky breath. “That’s what Brainy said.” She swallows and drops her voice low, “That it wouldn’t work.”

“That’s really why he didn’t bother trying to stop me?”

Alex gives a nod and looks back to her glass, but not before Lena sees the tear that starts to fall and Alex has to swipe at it, hard. It’s rough and Lena flinches at the hard motion.

And then Alex speaks, again.

“How long have you been in love with my sister?”

Alex doesn’t look at her this time, like she knows she’s gone too far and all the air has left the room. The moment feels like it goes forever, tethering them together and holding them down in this bar and it’s smothering, it’s truth, it’s too much. Lena stands and the stool swipes back, hard, a grating sound that’s satisfying, that feels like the sensation in Lena’s chest.

She leaves the bar and goes home, passes out and goes back to her lab in the morning.

She works on formula. On theories that once never interested her but now she’s obsessed with.

And finally, she calls Brainy, who comes to her lab and looks at her in her leggings and sweatshirt and sloppy hair. He looks at the scrawlings on her theories, at the device he so disagrees with, and finally at her.

“You’ve accepted it, then?” He more states than asks.

She juts her chin, again. One final grasp at control. “I need you to say it to me.”

And he will.

And he does.

“It’s inevitable. As some things are. This a life event that can’t be stopped.” He pauses, stares her right in the eye. “Believe me, I’ve looked at everything.”

It should hurt, this truth, but added in with the rest of it she really can’t feel much at all.

She nods, and he returns the gesture, and leaves her alone with a device that no one should have, and a truth that everyone seems to understand but her.

One more time.

A gift to herself. Or a penance, she isn’t sure. But she gives herself one more time either way.

They have coffee, and Lena sucks in a breath and finally lets herself flirt a little. Kara’s cheeks turn pink and her smile is shaky but bright and so so big and aching and pure across the table.

She asks Kara over for dinner, and Alex too, because Alex deserves to be there. Would want to be, even as the memory of it has broken them both repeatedly. In the versions Alex wasn’t there, Lena went back to an Alex who wouldn’t even look at anyone, let alone hold a conversation in a bar.

When Kara comes over, Lena kisses her as soon as the door closes. But this time, she doesn’t run away.

Instead, she revels in it. It’s languid, searching—it’s everything they could have been, and everything they should have had. It’s the first time and the last time and, somehow, in this warped universe, the second time.

It’s too many things, but Lena lets them be. Lets the reality of it wrap around her and press her closer. Lets herself deepen it. She threads her fingers in Kara’s hair, runs her fingers down Kara’s back. She cups her cheeks like Kara is something fragile: and she is. She is vulnerable, and strong, and flawed, and breakable, and just so very very _good_ that Lena simply aches with it. She thinks she could break right there at the goodness that is Kara.

Lena’s fingers graze her jaw and when the break apart, Kara’s eyes are glazed, her gaze on Lena and she gives a shaky laugh, presses their foreheads together.

“Finally,” Kara breathes.

And Lena barely trusts herself to huff a laugh, in case it gets drowned in a sob. Because Kara has no idea.

The rest happens like every time.

Except Kara’s eyes stay on her a little longer and Alex runs at the killer, gun firing and missing like always—they’ll never catch him. Ever. And Kara’s falling to the ground but Lena catches her and kneels on the ground and as everything goes black, she lets her fingers trail over her jaw again, tips warm with the blood from the corner of Kara’s mouth and her eyes see nothing but Lena keeps staring straight at them, anyway.

The lab is cold and empty and she actually shivers as she stands there. She swears she can still feel warm stickiness on her fingertips, but she stares at them and there’s nothing there.

The machine is easily dismantled, its components and their plans incinerated.

She slides into the stool next to Alex again and takes the whiskey Alex already had poured. Like she knew.

“To answer your question,” Lena says, pausing to take a sip that burns to her toes. She turns her head and Alex is watching her, elbow on the bar and head in her hand. “I’ve been in love with your sister since she first walked into my office. If you believe in that sort of thing.”

Alex looks like just, maybe, she does. She also looks heartbroken all over again.

 


End file.
